The streets of Tidecrest Haven at night were different from the daytime ones — narrower, it seemed, lit intermittently by lanterns hung outside doors, with voices and laughter filtering through half-shut windows. Simon walked without a real destination, letting his feet guide him through alleys he hadn't seen yet, enjoying for the first time in days a solitude that didn't weigh on him.
It was a small crowd gathered around a makeshift stall, at the edge of a little square, that caught his attention. He approached with the curiosity of someone who has nothing better to do, and found himself watching a game he'd never seen before, but that he recognized almost instinctively in its underlying mechanics.
Four people sat around a low table, each with a wooden dice cup in hand. In turn, they shook the dice inside, tipped them out covering them with a palm without showing anyone, and called out a score aloud — a combination, Simon gathered from watching a few rounds, ranging from low values up to rare and more prized combinations. The next player could choose to declare a higher score, trusting (or bluffing) on their own hidden hand, or openly doubt what the previous opponent had declared. If they doubted and the other had indeed lied, the doubter won. If instead the opponent had told the truth, the doubter lost.
Simple, elegant, and — Simon sensed immediately — perfect ground for anyone with even a shred of magical sensitivity.
A Beastman on the other side of the table looked up at him, noticing the interest with which Simon was watching the game. "Want to play, human?" he asked, with a grin that showed two short tusks.
"I don't have money," Simon said, honestly.
"First hand's free," the other said, shifting to make room for him. "Consider it a taste."
Simon sat down, took the cup passed to him, and started to play.
It became almost immediately clear, hand after hand, that he wasn't the only one at the table using something more than plain luck. Concentrating the way Corin had taught him, he felt — with that same subtle perception, that light warmth behind his eyes — small ripples every time one of the other three players declared a score. Not every declaration carried that crack. Only some. Which meant, he realized with a mix of unease and fascination, that all three of the others at the table were using magic skills of their own, some probably more refined than his, either to bluff or to read the others' bluffs.
A dice game that was, in reality, a small magical battlefield disguised as a tavern pastime.
Two players were eliminated within a few hands, one after the other, leaving only Simon and the Beastman who'd invited him to play.
"Last hand," the other said, shaking his own cup with a smile that promised nothing good.
Simon shook his, peeked quickly under his palm, and forced his face into neutral. Pair of suns — the second highest score possible in this system, from what he'd gathered watching the previous hands.
"Pair of suns," he declared, in a tone he hoped sounded more confident than he felt.
The Beastman shook his cup, flipped it, covered it. For an instant, focusing with all the attention he could gather, Simon felt something — a crack, faint, right as the other opened his mouth.
"Sun and moon pair," the Beastman said, the single highest score possible in the whole game.
Simon sat frozen, his heart pounding. He could doubt. His skill told him that declaration wasn't clean, that there was a lie hidden somewhere in those words. But doubting meant risking everything on a still-unripe feeling, an ability he'd learned less than two days before.
He opened his mouth, torn between doubting and folding.
He didn't have time to say anything.
An enormous hand slammed down on the table, sending cups and coins flying in every direction, and grabbed the Beastman across from Simon by the throat, lifting him bodily out of his chair as if he weighed no more than a sack of straw. The rest of the table — the other two players, the onlookers, even the stall keeper — vanished within a second, scattering in every direction with the speed of people who've already seen enough brawls to know when it's time not to be around.
Simon stayed seated, the only one left, too confused to move.
The newcomer was a massive Beastman, fur ragged and bristled, face and arms covered in old and new scars that told of a life spent solving problems with force more than words.
"Fenrik..." the Beastman held up by the throat gasped, legs kicking uselessly. "What can I do for you?"
"Tell me where I can find whoever gave that human some Climbing Goats," Fenrik said, his voice low and utterly without hesitation. "I know one was found together with an Ash Bat at the Isle of Hybrids harbor. I questioned the human. He's got a loose tongue, once you break a finger or two of his — and he told me it was you who gave him the contact."
The Beastman visibly paled under his fur. "Renn," he hissed, more a spit than a word. "That human bastard."
"Who's your contact?" Fenrik repeated, tightening his grip slightly.
Simon, still seated, still with his own dice hidden under his palm, felt something inside him — that stubborn thing, that inability to stay quiet in front of something that felt wrong — push him to speak before his brain could stop him.
"Excuse me," he said, raising a hand. "We were finishing a dice game. Do you mind?"
He remembered, in that absurd instant, what Corin had told him days before about the Beastmen — honor, a given word treated almost like a sacred pact, even in a tavern game. He hoped, with all the naivety of someone who hadn't yet learned enough about this world, that the same logic might apply even now.
Fenrik turned slowly toward him, his eyes studying him with a cold, appraising attention, for a time that seemed to stretch forever.
Fenrik didn't answer with words.
Simon saw his leg move before he could even register what was about to happen — a quick, brutal kick, delivered without the slightest warning, that caught him square in the stomach with a force that emptied his lungs in a single instant. The world flipped beneath his feet as he was lifted off the ground by the impact, air whistling in his ears for the fraction of a second he flew backward, before his back met the stone wall of a nearby house with a sharp thud that stripped away even the last scrap of breath he had left.
He slid down the wall to the ground, his vision blurring at the edges, the pain arriving all at once an instant later, like a wave that breaks late on the shore.
A scream — muffled, distant, as if heard underwater — filled his ears as his sight began to fade at the edges, the little square, the lanterns, Fenrik's now indifferent face turning back to the other Beastman, all of it slowly spinning out of focus.
The last thing he heard, before everything went dark, was Corin's voice, distorted by distance and panic.
"Simon! NO!"